Founding Engineer

About the company

Our client is an applied AI research company building production tools for safer AI use in regulated industries. The engineering team works closely with researchers and early customers.

The role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Join as a Founding Engineer to turn research into reliable product capabilities. You will shape architecture, build infrastructure, and help establish engineering practices.

What you'll do

- Build evaluation environments for AI systems used in financial workflows.

- Turn research prototypes into production-ready guardrails.

- Ship safety tooling and improve it through customer feedback.

- Make architecture decisions and build core infrastructure.

- Help shape engineering practices and adapt to changing research priorities.

Requirements

What we're looking for

- Software engineering experience delivering real products, with the structured experience range listed as 1 to 5 years.

- Hands-on experience with production systems and core infrastructure.

- Ability to build and own customer-facing features from scratch.

- Comfort working through ambiguity in a research-oriented environment.

- Strong computer science or technical fundamentals through education or professional experience.

- Ability to work onsite five days per week.

Bonus points

- Experience with agentic systems, retrieval, inference infrastructure, or self-hosted deployment.

- Experience building evaluation harnesses, RL environments, or training pipelines.

- Startup experience or a research background combined with commercial product delivery.

Benefits

Compensation and benefits

- Base salary: USD 185,000 to 250,000 per year.

- Unlimited paid time off.

Location and work model

- San Francisco, California, United States.

- Five days per week onsite.

- Visa transfers are supported.